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  • À l'école de P.-J.-O. Chauveau: Éducation et culture au XIXe siècle
  • Kurt W. Clausen
À l'école de P.-J.-O. Chauveau: Éducation et culture au XIXe siècle. Hélène Sabourin. Montreal: Leméac Éditeur, 2003. Pp.230, illus. $21.95

To a great extent, the educational drama of Quebec over the past century can be seen as an inheritance of reforms and policies dating back to that particularly fervent period between the beginning of Responsible Government and the years succeeding Confederation. Historians have traditionally attributed the creation of the province's particular character to a small number of larger-than-life figures who dominated the stage at [End Page 134] the time. Of these, special note has always been given to Jean-Baptiste Meilleur, the iconic first superintendent of education in Bas-Canada. So often it is Meilleur who is crowned the true founder of the Quebec education system, with his successor, Pierre-Joseph Olivier Chauveau, seen as an addendum, merely putting the final touches on the foundations that had already been built. This is why Dr Sabourin's biography is such a contribution to Quebec educational history - it exhumes Chauveau out from underneath the weight of his predecessor and places him firmly in the panoply of reformers on his own merit.

Of course, the general outline of Chauveau's career has never been completely unknown. Any general history book on the subject will tell you that he was a successful lawyer and writer. He served as superintendent of education for twelve years before Confederation, then as the first premier of Quebec and minister of public instruction. During his nearly twenty years in office, he brought three normal schools, two educational journals, and a ministry into existence. That he left Quebec with a basic public school structure at his retirement in 1873 has also been public- ly acknowledged. However, in comprehensively sifting through the immense archive of day-to-day correspondence left by Chauveau and his circle, Sabourin has managed to break through that plaster bust of a description to portray a person with greater depth and contradictions than one would have imagined.

Her detailed, chronological examination of Chauveau's rise in Quebec politics exposes him as a truly novel character that only the romantic era could produce - a political figure who was at once a poet, a scholar, and a bibliomaniac who nearly drove himself into bankruptcy. This makes a truly fascinating juxtaposition to the more irascible, blunt, and pragmatic Meilleur. In the end, the Gazette's conclusion matches Sabourin's own: 'le premier ministre était plus fait pour les choses de l'esprit que pour la vie politique' (203). Indeed, when he retired altogether from politics, Chauveau seemed very much in favour of abandoning la tâche - the burden of civic duty - regretting only his departure from his beloved ministry dedicated to education.

Readers will be disappointed only if they take the book's subtitle Éducation et culture au xixe siècle too seriously. So much of Chauveau's world was confined to his immediate concerns - his family, his friends, and local political intrigues. Education and culture are therefore relegated to a certain circle. L'Opinion publique proclaimed Chauveau the 'grand mandarin des écoles' (155); however, this wry comment should not be lost on the reader. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest promoters of education in mid-1800s Quebec, but throughout the book it remains unclear whether he actually entered a classroom in his adult life. Similarly, [End Page 135] although Chauveau may have felt that the minister of public instruction should advance 'culture,' it was definitely not that of the gens de pays.

Inevitably, the reader yearns to hear reflection on the larger issues of education happening at the time - to jump between the strata of class, language, and provincial boundaries. Allusions do come to the surface from time to time, but remain as whispers. In one of his more polemic letters, for instance, Meilleur accuses Chauveau of aping Ryerson. How much of this was sour grapes on the part of Meilleur and how much of it was true? Would Chauveau have had such success in...

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